importance of eu insurance

There’s a wonderful series of maps at WorldMapper – “The world as you’ve never seen it before” – showing graphically distorted maps of the world according to different socio-economic indicators.

It’s especially good as they do pairs of maps. The first one here shows global activity in exports of financial and insurance services:
>Of all the net finance and insurance services exports in the world, 99% of the profit flows to territories in Western Europe. Despite this, almost half of the 24 territories in Western Europe have no net finance and insurance services exports. The main exporting territories for these services are the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany and Luxembourg. The Malvinas (or Falkland Islands) are large on this map because they are resized according to the United Kingdom data.

And you can then compare it with this one, showing imports of the same services:

Somehow, it’s rather shocking to see just how little the US features on the first map, but I guess it’s because all their activity is to service their own domestic markets.